15.Nov.2010 | Matthew Cavnar
Signs of the End Times: Vook goes to Harvard
Vook was honored to have Matt Thurmond—a member of the TechMedia group at Harvard Business School—invite us to appear on a panel at their Cyberposium event this past Saturday at HBS. We joined Rick Richter, CEO of Ruckus Media Group, and Allison Dobson, Director, Digital Publishing, of Random House. Professor Rajiv Lal moderated our panel—and, crucially, figured out how to get the iPad projector working.
In the face of top-notch MBAs, we came prepared with figures on ebook publishing, the size of the market and device penetration. But Allison Dobson—an HBS grad—outdid all of us by dropping CAGR in her introduction.
The panel was both insightful and amusing—I hope it passed as quickly for the attendees as it did for us. We wanted to share our key take aways:
- PP&B is publishing lingo for “Paper, Printing and Binding.” Of a book with a $15 list price, about $1.65 of that is probably accounted for by PP&B.
- Rick stressed that digital’s $0 PP&B cost was still definitely advantageous
- All of us agree that video enhancements should serve the story and not create a “circus like” app experience
- Rick sees the greatest conflict in the future of digital publishing being compensation — ie, how do creatives make money off these projects and this new market?
- Ruckus is planning to create a lot of ORIGINAL content — not license or go after pre-existing content.
- Allison’s team did an incredible job on the Decision Points eBook — she demo’d it for the group. Make sure to get it here. Your opinion of Bush will shape your reading experience in a fascinating way. We’ll have another blog post about that soon.
- We all agreed that it’s unlikely that there will be an ereading standard format any time in the next three years.
In the attached photo you can see the cost breakdown of book publishing that Allison provided. We hope the metrics made everyone happy.
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